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OSI Model

I am just learning about the OSI model and am having a hard time getting things straight and keeping them that way. It keeps getting confusing and I have to know it inside out backwards and upside down if you catch my drift. Any tips that can help?

I will start getting one thing and then the book says something to contradict itself in a way. Its confusing.

Welcome to networking

I will start getting one thing and then the book says something to contradict itself in a way. Its confusing.

That's the way it is, my friend. I just read a very in-depth cisco document on their latest IOS release's command reference guide for a particular product. After reading and re-reading a few sections to make sure I had a handle on what I was trying to grasp...I noticed this blurb:

"...not all features may work as documented..."

This is why I have a test lab setup in my office, if you don't test prior to deployment you end up screwing the pooch royally.

Why OSI model is confusing me

Well in the book it gets into the OSI model and then is says that it is generalized and sometimes an imperfect representation of network communication. In some cases network functions can be associated with more than one layer of the model and in others network operations do not require services from every layer. So its a representation of what happens between two nodes communicating on a network that is not always how the nodes are communicating in some cases.

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